The Making of the Crew of the Dora (Book)

The only Nazi feature film shot on active war fronts!

The incredible story of BESATZUNG DORA as told by Karl Ritter himself!

For the first time in Third Reich Cinema literature, a book brings an insider’s perspective to working within the dictatorship for Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, the Reichsfilmintendanz, the OKW, and Ufa, who approved, then rejected, re–approved, supported, and in the end, banned the film from cinemas altogether.

The Crew of the Dora (1943) was the Third Reich’s last contemporary combat feature film, written, produced and directed by the Ufa film studio’s highly successful Karl Ritter (1888–1977). From producing Steinhoff’s Hitlerjunge Quex to his own Pour le Mérite, Ritter’s hard–hitting propaganda films had broken box office records and generated huge profits for Ufa. Stalin’s USSR demanded he stand trial for war crimes in 1945 for Quex, Über alles in der Welt, Kadetten, and his anti–Communist films about the Spanish Civil War and the Soviet GPU.

Dora was Ritter’s most ambitious and challenging effort. The script called for a story line on all three German war fronts simultaneously: the Western Front in France, the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, as well as on the North African Front. If that was not complicated enough, the film uniquely was to be filmed entirely on location with no studio shots. This meant putting the cast and crew in harm’s way on active war fronts in the middle of World War II for months at a time – a danger no other feature film took on, and one limited otherwise to the brave Deutsche Wochenschau cameramen and their Propaganda Companies.

This book provides 120 pages of transcribed excerpts from Ritter’s heretofore–unpublished diaries, following the conception, writing, production, filming and censorship of the film between May 1942 and March 1943.

With over 80 photographs, maps, sketches, and illustrations – many previously unpublished – The Making of The Crew of the Dora is an essential read for anyone interested in Nazi filmmaking.